Projects

• Aging and its Tropes

  (Columbia University)

• Community Commons

biography

Veronica Sousa is a first- year PhD student in the Anthropology department at Princeton University. She received her MA in the Anthropology department at The New School for Social Research with a Certificate in Gender and Sexuality Studies; and her BA in Anthropology from UC Berkeley. Veronica is concerned with how gender, aging, and health are reconfigured in political, legal, and medical realms. Her current work concerns aging women in both the Azores Islands and mainland Portugal, particularly how the economic crisis and unstable state of Portugal have affected the women’s access to healthcare, pharmaceuticals, and social services, such as services for domestic violence survivors – for which elderly women make up the largest demographic. She focuses on the modalities deployed by medicine and the state that de-gender the bodies of elderly women, and how this gendering/de-gendering tension compounds forms of marginalization - of violence, poverty, and poor healthcare - are worsened because, as it renders them visible. She is also interested in sexuality, race, migrants, intimacy and affect, and medico-legal histories in this context, as well as kinship, secrecy, and rumor.

research interests

Medical anthropology, legal anthropology, aging, gender, race, sexuality, kinship, secrecy and rumor, intimacy, affect, violence, illness, poverty, the state, Portugal